Thanks for the response. I had not tried the PCsync.exe yet, I was taking small steps and had only sent a “T149290XXXX” string manually over the Arduino IDE serial monitor before posting to the forum.
Since then, I set and read the time successfully using the adjust.ino sketch that was suggested by S. Hicks and then also read the time using the now.ino example code.
After some fiddling, here’s what I’ve concluded: PCSynch.ino is setting and reading the time correctly off the RTC (and so is the helper program PCsynch.exe), but there were some bugs in the serial.print commands in the loop() section of the PCSynch.ino sketch. How do I go about correcting the github code? … think it is called a “pull request” in their parlance, but am otherwise unclear on how to proceed.
It is really tiny stuff: using double quotes for a multi-character string instead of single quotes and removing a – 1 operation from the end of a now.dayOfWeek() call.